By the time you are finished with this, you will have a strange new respect for the Wasteland down south. Angelenos, now is the time to lean into Mike Davis's apocalyptic, passionate, radical rants on the sprawling, gorgeous mess that is Los Angeles. Meanwhile, even as the outsized presence of suburban homeowner associations has faded somewhat since City of Quartz'spublication, a new and arguably more perverse movement of housing activists has popped up in its place. Through uncovering this nefarious "geography of power" fueling the city's arts revival, Davis cuts through the rosy and obfuscatory presentation of the city's cultural renewal and interrogates these new arts projects as sites of political violence in the service of crude economic interests.

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz , Late Victorian Holocausts , and Planet of Slums . For some of us, skeptical of the value of detached scholarly inquiry, a work had to justify its existence by taking sides; a scholar had to explain themselves, and the luxury of time they seemed to enjoy, by offering up their texts as instruments of struggle. Mike Davis is getting increasingly vociferous about development and climate change, and in a way this is one of his milder books.Keeping despised communities enclosed in their areas isn't cost effective and the consequent strain on infrastructure is a recipe for disaster.

His next major book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), met a similar mixture of acclaim and criticism.You must also learn to make yourself more beautiful than others, to be the clone, to be the polystyrene clone of dead-eyed models. The close connections between corporations and scientific institutions, the mad mix of religious nutters. Just how we understood writing to flow into politics isn't entirely clear — like some of our professors, many of us simply held an under-scrutinized belief that writing simply is political, every published word equivalent to a sign held at a rally. Davis makes a compelling case for why the city operates the way it does - or, rather, why the city in the 90's, at the height of its various tensions, operated as it did; the revised edition isn't much revised at all in that sense - but he's short on solutions.

Art then isn't mention for a couple hundred pages until an anecdote about Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann walking near the bay when they noticed the beach covered which is first assumed to be caterpillars but is then recognized as thousands of condoms washing ashore from a water treatment plant. This move to keep different classes of people separate is echoed in what Davis terms Los Angeles’ move toward becoming a “fortress city,” beholden to a climate of fear and surveillance (224).Consequently, there is little hope professed in this book – whereas audiences normally look for hope. When documentary filmmaker Laura Gabbert made her loving treatment of Gold and his version of Los Angeles, the 2015 City of Gold (my favorite documentary film of all time) she featured footage of the wonderfully bearded Banham, lecturing to a hall full of students about how "L.